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Devilishly stealing reporters away from Oracle's OpenWorld conference, BEA sequestered them in a nearby hotel in San Francisco to discuss the newest version of the Weblogic Server code named "Diablo", now in it's 9.0 Beta release.

The event began with BEA people wearing red "devil horns" invading the Oracle conference in the Moscone center and brazenly holding up BEA signs nearby. They successfully drew an exclusive crowd of reporters from the leading technology publications to a standing-room only suite at the Palomar hotel.

Alfred Chuang, CEO of BEA stopped short of wearing devil horns, but did at one point grab them and put them on his head. He was surrounded by new executives including Mark Carges, the new CTO (8 year veteran from BEA and one of the original architects of Tuxedo), and Wai Wong, the new executive VP of products (16 year veteran from Computer Associates). Wai Wong is now in charge of the 700+ person product development team. Marge Breya, longtime marketing executive from Sun Microsystems has joined BEA as Chief Marketing Officer and was also at the event. Eric Stahl, in charge of product marketing for Weblogic was also in attendence.

So what are the key virtues of Weblogic 9.0? The biggest change is the JMS based store and forward messaging functionality which implements WS-ReliableMessaging. Wai Wong said that they had improved the performance of their Enterprise Service Bus technology by a multiple of "at least 3 or 4" over earlier versions, and that this version allowed for "thousands of messages per second". This fits with the Service Oriented Architecture loose coupling and asynchrounous flow extolled by their CTO.

Another virtue of this release is the "hot upgrade" feature. BEA bragged about project "Da Vinci" which is a carrier grade Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) container for Voice over IP (VOIP) phone applications. In these environments, servers are expected to be available all the time. Applications and servers can be upgraded without any service interruption. Alfred also mentioned project "ripcurl" which is an RFID edge server for retail and supply chain applications.

Concurrently with the availability of the Diablo release, BEA intends to make available a free download of JRockit 5.0, their high performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This JVM has adaptive memory management, which should allow the VM to automatically reconfigure garbage collection and dynamically adapt to changing conditions like workload, memory requirements and memory availability. This is intended to decrease requirements for tuning in some cases.

Alfred (Chuang) couldn't resist taking a swipe at the "leading company providing open source application servers". He said based on the information they were able to gather, this company generates as much revenue in a year as BEA generates in six hours. He also mentioned being "flattered" by rumors that Oracle was interested to buy BEA but emphasized that thier focus was in building BEA into a $10 billion dollar company.

It has been kind of a ritual. Anytime there is any posting about weblogic in any forum, the only thing I hear is that "everyone is leaving BEA ..". I'm not contesting that. My point is let's evaluate a product based on the features and not on the attrition rate. I believe that weblogic is a good product and they will be able to overcome the internal problems they are having. Having said that I'm eager to see the new features of weblogic 9.0 .

Minds coming and going might be an indicator of a company's health, or not. Features are great in marketechture, but what I want is results. Also I'd like these results to help me work how I see fit, not based on how some company (other than my employer) wants to dominate a market.

Examples of why I'm frustrated with BEA:

1: Folks I know recently wrote a webservice using XMLBeans to produce the, uh, XML. The service was meant to be consumed by a WL workflow. One problem. The WL workflow piece choked on the XMl.... Hmmm. Didn't XMLBeans come from BEA too?

2: A while back I was tasked to write a UI layer using Struts. We were using WL 8 beta, which was in the process of incorporating (absorbing?) Struts. A conflict came up (hey, it was beta after all) so we decided to re-invent parts of Struts to support "easy integration in the future", that is, after BEA worked out the conflict. Well. The future never came for us. ... I can't blame this on BEA, exactly, but their choice to use Struts seems to have made their life better, not mine. (hmm. come to think of it, maybe I'm wrong. Now I use Spring!)

3: Somewhere along the way I discovered a flaw in BEA's JSP implementation. There's a bug that forces you to declare a variable in scriptlet, then reference that in a runtime expression. The specification clearly says that the runtime expression must work on its own.... So I opened a case with BEA's support service. Their response was that they knew of the bug and if I'd give then a good enough business case for its fix, they'd look into it.... What? Business case!? Hell. Are they compliant with the spec or not? Isn't claiming compliance while not being compliant false advertising? Isn't THAT a good enough business case?

4: My employer shelled out a load of money to get BEA's support. Whenever we had an issue the only kind of answers we got were to use Workshop and blah blah blah. This even though we were clear in stating that we were not using Workshop for X, Y or Z. They really seemed more interested in selling us into their entire product line and development philosophy than helping us work out issues.

... Of course. Never mind what I think. Someone higher up has already decided that my next project must be built on Weblogic. I doublt that person has the experience I do developing J2EE applications, but I'm pretty sure they saw a brochure! :-)

It has been kind of a ritual. Anytime there is any posting about weblogic in any forum, the only thing I hear is that "everyone is leaving BEA ..". I'm not contesting that. My point is let's evaluate a product based on the features and not on the attrition rate. I believe that weblogic is a good product and they will be able to overcome the internal problems they are having. Having said that I'm eager to see the new features of weblogic 9.0 .- Neeraj

Thanks Thomas, and sorry I didn't see your post before my last post (oops!). My team ran into issues trying to move from SP2 to SP3, so that's my excuse.

Are you pulling porlets from applications deployed on different servers or all in one WL instance? (I know it shouldn't matter, I'm just curious.)

How are you dealing with look-n-feel consitency? Are you defining a common CSS for everyone to follow? Do you need more guidelines than that?

Are you using portlets as the only model for display or mixing it with regular web applications? (It seems to me that portlets are good for little, simple, read-only views that can then link to full applications. I'm curious if anyone is doing it that way.)

How are you dealing with look-n-feel consitency? Are you defining a common CSS for everyone to follow? Do you need more guidelines than that?

WSRP has a well defined set of CSS classes for this purpose

Are you using portlets as the only model for display or mixing it with regular web applications? (It seems to me that portlets are good for little, simple, read-only views that can then link to full applications. I'm curious if anyone is doing it that way.)

portlets can be full blown applications, whether JSPs, JSR168, Struts, or Pageflows ( and JSF in 9.0)

WSRP can be used with both WebLogic Portal and WebLogic Server. Starting with 8.1 Sp3 line. WebLogic Portal can play Consumer and Producer role with PageFlows, 168, and Struts portlets. WebLogic Server can play Producer role with PageFlows and Struts applications.

Actually, I was quite disappointed with Weblogic Platform 8 (SP3).Weblogic platform has a nice server as its core - no one can argue this. But other components have disadvantages.

- "Own standards" approach. Don't expect WLP applications to be portable. Almost all features either encourage or force your app to use weblogic platform.

- Some features not implemented, others partially and very often (one of examples from my work: doc states there is a library service in weblogic portal cms but you cannot enable it. Look here: http://e-docs.bea.com/wlp/docs81/adminportal/help/CM_EditRepository.html and then try to find the "Enable Library Services?" checkbox in portal admin. Also, in fact you cant have more than one BEA repository in your portal - every new repository is just a synonym for existing one, with the same content)

- lack of docs, especially considering the fact that generally you cant do what you need intuitively.

- no source code. Sometimes I need to decompile classes to get an idea how to use them.

- JRockit is significantly slower than Sun JVM. Fortunately, these 2 JVMs can be substituted easily.

- Workshop seems to be very unstable and slow IDE. It has fancy visual PageFlow editor, but misses the very basic features of java IDE - refactoring, javabean property management, javadoc generation and so on. If you've ever worked with Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA you know what I'm talking about. And beware: once you use workshop, you are very likely to get tied to it and have no chance to get off - no other IDEs can handle pageflows, controls, EJBs, processes and so on (Apache Beehive project can partially change this. BEA guys really deserve respect for pushing pageflows to open source community). If you still willing to develop with Workshop, make sure your PC has >= 1 GB RAM before developing with Workshop. And have your favorite book nearby - you will get plenty of time while building the project and waiting for redeployment to complete. Personally I prefer "Better, lighter, faster java" by Bruce Tate.

- JRockit is significantly slower than Sun JVM. Fortunately, these 2 JVMs can be substituted easily.

We've pretty universally seen that JRockit performs at least 25% faster than the Sun JVM... so the comment about JRockit being slower than the Sun JVM is incorrect. However, granted that initial startup time with Sun JVM is slightly faster than it is with JRockit.

Yes, I've run portal admin checked and I see that "" checkbox. I also recall that this problem was related to SP2, before upgrade to SP3.I'm sorry for wrong statement about content management in my previous post - they are correct for SP2, not SP3.

Changing the way you think about something so important to you as your job is very Difficult.

Before working with Java I used Oracle's 4GL tool and a little bit of VB. The problems with client server were obvious hence moving to java for more portability, openness, and network capabilities was an obvious move. The predominant criticisms of java was that it was a fad and it was slow.

In reality, the problem was that moving from 4GL to text-editor or Java IDE development was a huge loss in productivity and a big learning curve. OO is great, but it is most often too low-level for business logic developers.

While there are valid criticisms of workshop, the combination of java, j2ee, a powerful app server, and 4GL productivity is an enormous achievement. I am sure as the resistence-to-change wears off and the workshop application frameworks become standardized, this will be obvious to all.Matt

I know that WLS 9.0 runs under JDK 5, but can it run under JDK 1.4? We have an issue with JDK 5 and Novell JLDAP where it takes ~4.5s to open an LDAP connection. With JDK 1.4 it takes only 0.1s to open the LDAP connection.

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